Ambivalence in play and ritual

Life is not breath, but action; to live is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, every part of ourselves which gives us the feeling of our own existence. Rousseau Emile     

Stressors and Social Resources at Work: Examining the Buffering Effects of LMX,POS, and Their Interaction on Employee Attitudes

Journal of Business and Psychology - Numerous advancements have been made regarding how aspects of job roles and organizational environments affect work attitudes. However, less attention has been...     

Teaching for Creativity Scales: An Instrument to Examine Teachers’ Perceptions of Factors That Allow for the Teaching of Creativity

Creativity is valuable for individuals and society; it is thus important to understand how creativity can be fostered and encouraged. Teachers have a unique opportunity to promote creativity among their students. Teaching for Creativity Scales analyze constructs that influence teachers’ perceptions of teaching for creativity. Approximately 650 teachers completed the survey. In the exploratory factor analysis, the items fit a 4-factor structure, producing 4 subscales: teacher self-efficacy, environmental encouragement, societal value, and student potential. The instrument was revised and distributed to additional teachers for a confirmatory factor analysis. With a few item deletions, the proposed model was a good fit for the data (CMIN/df = 1.819, CFI = .923, TLI rho2 = .917, RMSEA = .053). With continued testing and revisions, this instrument could be useful for measuring perceptional changes due to designed interventions, comparing different populations of teachers, and describing creativity perceptions at a given school.     

Preattentive texture segmentation: The role of line terminations,size, and filter wavelength

The texel pair represents a dilemma in texture discrimination because, despite having the same component orientations, discrimination is still possible (Julesz, 1981), showing a performance asymmetry. Other possible element properties that could influence this task are line terminations, closure, and the size of these elements. We found that line terminators are critical for the task; however, results from double-task experiments indicated that terminator-based discrimination requires the use of attention. When attention is not available for the task, “size” of the elements (with the considered slightly larger) seems to be critical for this discrimination and for the asymmetric performance. To generalize the concept of “size” to textures in general, further experiments were performed with textures of different-sized elements. Results showed, as past literature has indicated, that there is a performance asymmetry, with the larger of the elements being more visible when in the foreground. This asymmetry was additionally shown to reverse itself (i.e., the smaller element became the more visible) as the scale of the elements increased (while interelement distance remained fixed). A filter analysis was developed in order to measure the apparent size of these elements within textures (texsize), defined as the response weighted average of the filter wavelength, $\bar \lambda $ , for a group of elements. The calculation of $\bar \lambda $ was attained by introducing a nonlinearity after the second stage of filtering (or spatial averaging of filter responses). This analysis showed high correlation between the texture with the larger $\bar \lambda $ and the more visible texture. On the basis of this correlation, a wavelength-dependent noise is proposed, having more internal noise for low-spatial-frequency filters and less for high-spatial-frequency filters.     

Developmental aspects of auditory and visual scanning.

60 Ss from Grades 1 through 6 were administered an auditory and visual scanning procedure and 27 of those Ss were given arithmetic and reading achievement tests. Data indicated scanning ability increases linearly with grade in school and the relationship between the scanning measures also increases sharply with grade. Auditory scanning was related to academic achievement; visual scanning only approached significance with arithmetic achievement but was unrelated to reading achievement.     

Facial expressions: An objective method in the quantitative evaluation of emotional change

A method is presented for obtaining a seriesofsilhouettes that were analyzed as profiles of the human face. When depressed psychiatric patients smiled before and after electroshock therapy, a greater facial displacement was recorded after treatment. Controls did not show any trend in this regard.